Explore New Orleans

The New Orleans Museum of Art, founded in 1911 as the Delgado Museum, is the city's oldest fine-arts museum and stands in City Park. Its collection of about 40,000 works ranges from European painting and Japanese art to photography, glass and art from Africa and the Americas. Beside it lies the Besthoff Sculpture Garden.

Preservation Hall is a small jazz venue on St. Peter Street in the French Quarter, founded in 1961 to keep traditional New Orleans jazz alive. Short acoustic sets by the house band and guest musicians are played several times a night in a plain, worn room where most of the audience sits on benches or stands.

The Hermann-Grima House is a Federal-style brick mansion on St. Louis Street in the French Quarter, built in 1831 for the merchant Samuel Hermann. Guided tours show the furnished rooms, the courtyard garden, the stable and the open-hearth kitchen, and tell of the family and of the enslaved people who worked in the house.

The Old Ursuline Convent on Chartres Street was completed in 1752 for Ursuline nuns who came from France in 1727 to run a school and a hospital. It is among the oldest buildings in the Mississippi valley. A museum shows the nuns' history and the convent rooms, next to St. Mary's Church and a formal garden.

St. Louis Cathedral is the seat of the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans, facing Jackson Square in the French Quarter. A church has stood on the site since 1718; the present building dates from 1794 and was largely rebuilt in 1850, giving it its three spires. Inside are painted ceilings and stained-glass windows.

The Cabildo on Jackson Square was built in 1795-1799 as the seat of the Spanish colonial city council. The formal transfer of the Louisiana Purchase took place here in 1803. Today it is part of the Louisiana State Museum, with exhibitions on the history of Louisiana from colonial times to Reconstruction.

The New Orleans Jazz Museum occupies the Old U.S. Mint at the corner of Esplanade Avenue and Decatur Street, a Greek Revival building of 1835 that struck coins until 1909. Part of the Louisiana State Museum, it shows instruments, recordings and photographs from the history of jazz, and its performance hall hosts concerts.

The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in the Warehouse District is devoted to the art of the American South, from the 18th century to today. Founded in 1999 around the collection of Roger Ogden, it shows painting, photography, sculpture and crafts in a modern hall linked to the 1889 Howard Memorial Library, designed after H. H. Richardson.

The National WWII Museum in New Orleans' Warehouse District tells the story of the American experience in the Second World War. It opened in 2000 as the National D-Day Museum and was named the country's official WWII museum by Congress in 2003. Its pavilions hold aircraft, vehicles, oral histories and a submarine experience.